Tag: conspiracy theory

I had the pleasure to explore with M J Banias the relation between the UFO mythos and various racist and extremist ideologies. The thoughts that follow I owe to Banias’ welcome invitation to discuss the matter and to our subsequent lively conversation, which, happily, posed more questions than it answered! You can hear that conversation, here.

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That UFOs might impinge in any way on “the real word” is a bizarre thought. That flying saucers and their extraterrestrial pilots have been ubiquitous in the popular imagination for a lifetime now will meet with ready acceptance, but that such a flighty fantasy might bear in any way on the grave matters of real life is a proposal not to be taken seriously. At least until one learns that the leader of a Brazilian UFO contactee group carried out false-flag terrorist attacks with members of Brazil’s security forces between December 1967 to August 1968 to prop up the nation’s dictatorial regime, or that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, a fan of Bill Cooper’s radio show, had visited Area 51 and while on death row watched Contact six times in two days.

On the face of it, it shouldn’t be surprising that members of the UFO community, being ordinary people, too, will have their opinions concerning politics and society, from the banal to the extreme. That Jacques Vallée has little patience for the French Left or that Richard Dolan believes that the marriage of free market capitalism and liberal democracy is the best of all possible worlds have likely little or nothing to do with their ufological concerns. Likewise, racist ideas shared by a member of MUFON or racist and anti-Semitic slurs from the mouth of a channeler are probably inspired by the racist and anti-Semitic ideas of these respective people not their ufological or New Age interests and beliefs.

But the relation can be more complicated. James Gilliland’s pronouncements from the ECETI ranch, despite their claiming to take up “an objective non-party non-political approach” are vehemently anti-“Left”, critical of identity politics, pro-Trump, and conspiracist. That his newsletters evoke both the “lame stream media” (modern American English for that bit of Nazi propaganda, die Lügenpresse (“lying press”)) and New Age “Universal” or “Natural Law” suggests a less than accidental relation between his politics and ufological beliefs.

Right wing politics and ufology are even more intimately related for Michael Salla, who finds support for his exopolitical beliefs in the Q Anon conspiracy theory. He gathers that some of the crumbs dropped by Q confirm his beliefs about human-extraterrestrial interaction and a Secret Space Program. However, in the same mouthful, he also swallows the line that Trump was recruited and placed in power by a group of “White Hats” working to unmask and destroy the “Deep State” (“aka Cabal / Illuminati / Global Elite“). Here, he takes up whole cloth an old elaborate conspiracy theory first elaborated by fellow Australian Stan Deyos in his 1973 The Cosmic Conspiracy, which weaves strands of the UFO myth together with older threads about the Illuminati, which, in turn, Sallas twists together with fantasies about Satanic pedophile rings and even more sinister, anti-Semitic ones, in this case, attacks on the Rothschilds and George Soros.

This tendency of certain aspects of the UFO mythology to combine with extreme right wing ideologies was noted with some anxiety by Jacques Vallée in his 1991 book Revelations.

Another aspect many researchers of this field—with a few courageous and notable exceptions—have studiously ignored, is the link between the more eager proponents of imminent extraterrestrial contact and the American extreme right….

It could well be that the same kind of fanaticism that leads people to join neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic, and survivalist movements in the American southwest also induces them to believe in the imminent arrival of aliens from the sky. It could be that these groups who are convinced that government secrecy is abused in order to hide political truths from the public also believe that the reality of UFOs has been kept from us… (256-7)

That nexus of stories about “imminent extraterrestrial contact and the American extreme right” had been growing in the decade leading up to Vallée’s expression of concern and was about to effloresce in the years following. Ufologically, an important set of rumours was begun, first thanks to Stanton Friedman’s groundbreaking research into the crash at Roswell in 1978, which was quickly followed by Berlitz’s and Moore’s 1980 The Roswell Incident. By 1984, the MJ-12 documents had surfaced, and, by 1988, an entire submythology had developed, about crashed flying saucers, retrieved and back-engineered alien technology, recovered ufonauts living and dead, treaties with alien races that traded technological know-how for the rights to mutilate cattle and abduct human beings, underground bases both human and alien, and the struggle to reveal this “horrible truth” that culminated in the TV documentary “Cover-Up: Live!” and the most ambitious synthesis of these tales with New World Order conspiracy theories, Bill Cooper’s Behold a Pale Horse (1991). Following the incidents at Ruby Ridge (1992) and Waco (1993), those “neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic, and survivalist movements in the American southwest” and the conspiracy theories that went with them would in turn explode in number, only to slowly decrease until the elections of Barack Obama and Donald Trump breathed new life into their paranoia and sense of legitimacy.

The belief that “that the reality of UFOs has been kept from us” has a long ufological pedigree. Donald Keyhoe already in his first book The Flying Saucers are Real (1950) posits that the USAF knows UFOs are extraterrestrial spaceships but suppresses this acknowledgement and actively debunks sightings in the name of national security; the truth will be revealed only after a careful process of acclimatization via strategic leaks, disinformation, and the entertainment media, all leading up to a moment of “disclosure”. It’s not until the process of decay of public trust in the US government sets in, with the growth of the American national security state, beginning with the founding of the CIA in 1947, and with “deep events”, such as the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and, most recently, 9/11, (which in turn lead to notions of an “invisible government” as early as 1964, the “shadow government”, and the “deep state”) that The Flying Saucer Conspiracy (the title of Keyhoe’s 1955 book) devolves into the “horrible truth” expounded by the likes of Bill Cooper and John Lear that finds affinities with the New World Order conspiracy theories of the American militia movement.

This parallel development of narratives around UFO secrecy and the conspiracy theories held by various American anti-government groups arguably shows that UFO conspiracy theories are not essentially racist and that those of anti-government groups don’t necessarily entail an interest in UFOs. The UFO conspiracy discourse is merely consistent with and can therefore all the easier enter into conversation with the anti-government conspiracy theorizing of the various American patriot / militia groups, whose ideologies are also often racist and anti-Semitic, White Supremacist or Neo-Nazi, and vice versa. Thus, it is the intersection of anti-government sentiments that creates the space where a certain kind of UFO belief and extremist ideology can fuse.

However little UFO and New World Order / Illuminati conspiracy theories entail each other, various extremists haven’t shied away from invoking advanced aeronautical technology or extraterrestrial origin stories to bolster claims to their own legitimacy. One instance are stories about Nazi flying saucers, whether as experimental prototypes recovered by the Allies or Soviets at the end of the WWII or as actually functioning aeroforms developed by the genius of Germany’s scientists, with or without extraterrestrial coaching, stories already extant at the writing of Donald Keyhoe’s The Flying Saucers are Real (1950). These rumours are often promulgated as evidence of the superior intelligence and technical ingenuity of the Third Reich and sometimes developed into narratives about a “Fourth Reich”, with bases in South America, Antarctica, the Moon or other planets, or even as an element of the evolving New World Order. In this extended form, the idea of the Nazi flying saucer is used as a tool for Neo-Nazi recruitment, fund-raising, or a means to insinuate Neo-Nazi ideas into more conventional conversation. As the Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel explained:

I realized that North Americans were not interested in being educated. They want to be entertained. The book [UFOs: Nazi Secret Weapon?] was for fun. With a picture of the Führer on the cover and flying saucers coming out of Antarctica it was a chance to get on radio and TV talk shows. For about 15 minutes of an hour program I’d talk about that esoteric stuff. Then I would start talking about all those Jewish scientists in concentration camps, working on these secret weapons. And that was my chance to talk about what I wanted to talk about.

Of course, white supremacists make reference not only to imagined technological achievement, but lay claim to the totality of human knowledge, science, and civilization in general, as ex-MUFON director John Ventre so infamously did in 2018. Not only that, but it has been remarked that a similar imperialist rhetoric is at work in Ancient Astronaut / Alien Theory, that, since we moderns cannot imagine how the non-white peoples of antiquity constructed certain instances of monumental architecture, whether the pyramids, Macchu Picchu, or the heads of Easter Island, for example, they must have received technical support from extraterrestrial “gods”. However much some particular versions of the argument might find their inspiration in or lend support to white supremacist beliefs, a little research quickly shows that the same discourse also points to the “equally impossible” construction of Stonehenge or the Goseck Circle in Germany. More importantly, the white supremacist sentiments that underwrite views about the inability of ancient, nonwhite peoples to construct monumental architecture spring not only from beliefs in European intellectual and technological superiority, articulated and entrenched in natural history and anthropology (race theory) but from the more deeply-entrenched technocentric / technophilic prejudices characteristic of European colonists, race theoretical hierarchies, and ufology in general, because it is the ideology of the so-called advanced societies.

Curiously, such appeals to technological achievement are not restricted to Neo-Nazis or white supremacists. In 2015, Y. Sudershan Rao, recently appointed by India’s ruling Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party to head the Indian Council of Historical Research made glowing references to vimanas or Vedic aircraft. “Capable of interplanetary travel and invisibility, possessing radar systems and mine detectors, they capture the imagination of this resurgent, neo-­Hindu India like nothing else.” Just like allusions to Nazi technological genius, references to a mythic Vedic Golden Age of futuristic technology by Hindu Nationalists support claims to cultural / racial / national priority and ascendancy. However much references to fictitious vimanas and other technology belong more to discourses concerning Lost Civilizations or Ancient Discoveries, ufophiles will be quick to recognize the vimana from Ancient Astronaut / Alien Theory. In any case, the rhetoric at work is recognizable.

Upping the ante from boasts of technological prowess to extraterrestrial ancestry is the anti-Semitic, Greek nationalist Team Epsilon. We owe what we know about Team Epsilon in the anglophone world to religious studies scholar Tao Thykier Makeeff. He draws our attention to various forms the ideas of this very protean group have taken. Like the Neo-Nazis and Hindu nationalists, Team Epsilon asserts its members have been involved in the invention of an array of science-fictional weaponry. An important figure in this regard is physicist and inventor George Gkiolvas,

who claims to have worked for NASA developing a number of secret weapons including a sound cannon and special anti-aircraft technology. Gkiolvas’ real claim to fame is the invention of the so-called Bevatron, which according to epsilonist mythology is a secret weapon, sometimes referred to as the Greek ‘Golem’ against the Jews.

The Epsilonists add to technical prowess extraterrestrial ancestry. George Lefkofrydis in his Spaceship Ep­silon: Aristotle’s Organon: The Researcher (1977) advances that “Aristotle was an extraterrestrial from the star Mu in the constellation Lagos.” In 1996, Anestis S. Keramydas expands on this notion of extraterrestrial descent, stating that “not only the Greeks, but also the Jews, were originally from outer space.” For this reason, modern Greeks, descendants of a divine alien race (the gods), possess superior DNA, which is not to be mixed with that of lesser races.

Not to be outdone, America Black nationalist groups The Nation of Islam and a protean group whose various incarnations might be collectively termed Nuwabians enlist the UFO and extraterrestrial mythology to support their claims to being superior to “the blue-eyed devil.” The Nation of Islam’s founder, The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, makes of Ezekiel’s Chariot a wheel-shaped “Mothership”; his followers, therefore, have taken UFO sightings as verification of their founder’s prophetic knowledge. The Nuwabians, on the other hand, have developed a mythology concerning their own descent from the ancient Egyptians, who were themselves interstellar refugees, the Annunaqi Eloheem, from the planet Rizq. This genealogy lets the Nuwabians claim both extraterrestrial ancestry and the technological ingenuity and know-how of these ancestors.

These Hindu and Black nationalist appeals to technical virtuosity, however, fall into a problematic dialectic. Every appeal to technical superiority, because such superiority is in the first instance always associated with European / Western / White civilization, must always, even and especially when it’s enlisted to empower the Hindu or Black, play into a white supremacist discourse. By trying to “beat the White Man at his own game” one plays by his rules, plays the opponent’s game, thereby affirming the prior and inescapable legitimacy of one’s opponent’s position, namely, his prior superiority.

Most importantly, this dialectic is itself governed by what I’ve come to term “Promethean idolatry”, the unquestioned valorization of technological sophistication and power that Jürgen Habermas already in the 1970s fingered as the ideology of the so-called developed world. In every case examined here, the same fateful orientation is at play, which allows one to speak of more or less technologically advanced societies at all, whether in the future, the lost past, or the far reaches of space. This ontotheological foundation of arguably all ufological discourse is the most obscured, if not the darkest, side of the UFO.

Addendum: Any member of the cognoscenti reading the above will likely notice how schematic my account of those pivotal decades of the 1980s and 1990s is. Interested parties are here referred to Michael Barkun’s A Culture of Conspiracy (2nd ed., 2013), especially chapters 5-9, whose summation of the version of events (98) confirms mine. I regret not having had Barkun’s study, which I cannot recommend highly enough, in hand at the time of writing this post. As I have observed in this regard, the phenomenon and its attendant study both possess an ever deepening history, and to know or claim to have broken new ground requires a knowledge of that history, a task made greater every day.

If it’s not too bizarre a claim to make in the context of a cultural field as marginal and questionable, in ufology Donald Keyhoe is a monumental figure. No history of the UFO can overlook his contributions as a researcher and activist, as director of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) and one of the first and most forceful figures to press for Congressional hearings into the question of the UFO, arguably inaugurating similar, continuing efforts on the part of today’s Disclosure movement. What’s telling, either about the UFO as such or Keyhoe’s insight into the phenomenon, is the the way his original conclusions set forth in his article for True Magazine “The Flying Saucers are Real” and his book of the same title, both published in 1950, continue to set the ufological agenda.

In line with the USAF’s own reasoning, Keyhoe posited what is now known as the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH), that UFOs are spaceships of interplanetary origin. Keyhoe and the Air Force arrived at this conclusion by a process of elimination. Some of the reported sightings could not be explained away as misidentifications or hoaxes; neither the American military nor any of its allies or enemies possessed the aeronautical technology to produce aeroforms with the flight characteristics of the disks, nor did it make sense that if the disks were experimental aircraft that they would be tested in ways that might allow this new weapon to be observed or even captured or that threatened civilian life and limb and that had actually resulted in the death of one airman, Thomas Mantell; therefore, since no conventional, earthly explanation existed to explain these uncanny flying machines, they were most likely of extraterrestrial origin. This argument in support of the ETH is repeated to this day.

The ETH found further support and elaboration in matching the patterns of reported sightings to speculations about how humankind might explore inhabited planets in the future with the result that the way the story of the flying disks had developed to this point mirrored the way human beings would proceed with their own explorations. This projection of an imagined human future behaviour also extended to the disks’ extraterrestrial origin: the pilots’ technology must be in advance of our own, given what their ships can do and how far they must have traveled to have reached earth from some distant planet if not, as was thought more likely, star. That is, their intelligence is an anthropomorphic one, that, like our own, proceeded along a path of tool-using, technological development. At work here is a fateful generalization and failure of imagination that posits human intelligence as singular and archetypal and the radically contingent history of industrial civilization as typical of intelligent beings. Such a projection of the “human form divine” finds its culmination in Keyhoe’s finding himself unable to picture the extraterrestrials as anything other than anthropomorphic, because of

the stubborn feeling that they would resemble man. That came, of course, from an inborn feeling of man’s superiority over all living things. It carried over into the feeling that any thinking, intelligent being, whether on Mars or Wolf 359’s planets, should have evolved in the same form. (The Flying Saucers are Real, 136)

These anthropocentric and technocentric prejudices remain as operative in much of the UFO imaginary as they go unremarked.

An equally persistent set of concerns orbits the potentially disruptive consequences of the revelation of the reality of extraterrestrial, technologically advanced civilizations having appeared in our skies. Keyhoe mulling this matter over with his editor as they prepare to publish his article for True Magazine reflects that “public acceptance of intelligent life on other planets would affect almost every phase of our existence—business, defense planning, philosophy, even religions” (139), a supposition that inspires the 300+ pages of Richard M. Dolan’s and Bryce Zabel’s 2012 book A.D. After Disclosure: When the Government Finally Reveals the Truth About Alien Contact.

More acutely, in the wake of the purported reaction to Orson Welles’ 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast, many feared the most immediate reaction to the news would be widespread panic. These considerations guide the development of official reaction to the phenomenon. As Keyhoe saw it, the USAF first set out to “investigate and at the same time conceal from the public the truth about the saucers” (173). Then “it was decided to let the facts gradually leak out, in order to prepare the American people.” However, “the unexpected public reaction [to the True Magazine article] was mistaken by the Air Force for hysteria, resulting in their hasty denial that the saucers existed.” The problem of just what to reveal and conceal concerning the saucers was also complicated by Cold War national security issues. As Keyhoe saw it

The education problem is complicated by two imperative needs. We must try to learn as much as we can about the space ships’ source of power, and at the same time try to prevent clues to this information from reaching an enemy on earth. (174)

Here are nascent themes in ufological speculation that persist and have been developed to the present day. First is the belief that militaries and governments around the world have or continue to investigate UFOs. Secondly, their efforts have borne fruit in determining the (usually extraterrestrial) truth of the phenomenon. Thirdly, because of the explosive nature of these discoveries, those who hold these secrets dissimulate concerning the phenomenon to dissuade serious, public interest and to maintain either the potential or real technological advantage these secrets bestow, or, alternatively, they are engaged in a process of public education through a combination of leaks, disinformation, and popular culture (such as movie and television) to prepare society for the ultimate revelation of the reality of the extraterrestrial presence.

Hand in hand with this motif is that of the insider able to access this otherwise secret or tactfully unpublicized information, a figure that has morphed, today, into the whistleblower. Keyhoe, as an ex-Marine pilot, maintained many contacts within the military and government. Most of the narrative of his books is conversations he has with these inside sources. The final chapters of The Flying Saucers are Real find Keyhoe studying over two hundred secret Air Force files released to him and his petitioning a general of his acquaintance for the more than one hundred he had been denied! This figure with access to inside information undergoes a change as the official relation to the phenomenon (at least in its public guise) develops from secrecy, to debunkery, to indifference. The truth is no longer obtained via official documents from official channels, but via leaked or hacked documents or whistleblower, witness testimony.

Two other dimensions of the UFO myth appear in Keyhoe’s first book. At one point, an informant tells him that he has learned that the flying disks are British secret weapons developed from German plans and prototypes captured at the end of the Second World War (122). Here, the myth of the Nazi flying saucer, arguably first popularized by Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel as a money-making scheme but since elaborated perhaps most fully by Joseph Farrell, makes very likely its first appearance in print. Moreover, although, tellingly, the Roswell incident is not mentioned in The Flying Saucers are Real, another of Keyhoe’s informants relates to him a story about “little men from Venus”:

In the usual version, two flying saucers had come down near our southwestern border. In the space craft were several oddly dressed men, three feet high. All of them were dead; the cause was usually given as inability to stand our atmosphere. The Air Force was said to have hushed up the story… (139)

The source of this particular story is given as George Koehler (165), who later admits to its being “a gag”. But the rumour also brings to mind a more famous fabrication by Frank Scully, whose Behind the Flying Saucers is published the same year as Keyhoe’s first book. Regardless of who first invents this scenario, we find here the vector for what will be called Crash/Retrieval Syndrome, a string of increasingly elaborate stories concerning crashed and retrieved flying saucers and the capture of their pilots, dead or alive, that will bloom with the rediscovery of the Roswell Crash and subsequently flower into a wildly variegated myth of reverse-engineered alien technology, secret treaties between various ET races and earth governments, breakaway civilizations, exopolitics and disclosure, a term that perhaps appears for the first time in the UFO literature in Keyhoe’s important first volume.

Addendum: …and just to be clear

Some readers might be tempted to take this post as a panegyric to Keyhoe. My purpose, however, was to outline how even his earliest ufological publications set the ufological agenda to this day.

Most ufology, arguably, adheres to the anthropocentric ETH Keyhoe sets out. The social repercussions of the truth of the ETH are likewise seen to be still as acute and wide ranging. For this reason, the motives to maintain secrecy around private and state research into and discoveries concerning UFOs and ETs are the same Keyhoe saw. The way this secrecy is breached has changed since Keyhoe’s day, as I note, but the basic patterns of disclosure (Keyhoe’s word) are still affirmed. Moreover, the myths of Nazi flying saucers and Crash/Retrieval Syndrome are still with us, however much in more developed forms than the nascent ones present in The Flying Saucers Have Landed.

Why ufology should remain static in this way is itself a question that demands to be looked into….

The conspiratorial mindset likely goes back at least as far as the paranoid cosmologies of the Gnostics two millennia ago. One of its latest iterations is Q or QAnon, a conspiracy theory that in its manner of dissemination, the style of its expression, and the wildness of its content makes it more impressive as an instance of modern art than a revelation of the secret order of the world it pretends to be.

Q appears first 28 October 2017 on /pol/, a sub-board of 4-chan, unwinding a thread titled “Calm Before the Storm” alluding, supposedly, to a remark made by President Trump early that month. The thread’s author claimed to have Q-level security clearance, having access to highly-classified information he then prolifically released in idiosyncratically worded “crumbs” that outlined an increasingly complex and bizarre vision of contemporary world politics, focused on Trump’s battle with the Deep State. Anyone familiar with the Exopolitics and Disclosure movements will also know UFOs and ETs have also been woven into the Q narrative.

Why anyone would take the incoherent and madly speculative worldview Q lays out for the way things really are is as much a psychological or sociological as an epistemic question. However, if one brackets the question of the truth of Q’s revelations, then the trail of crumbs Q has left his public appear as a work of fiction or poetry that meets Rimbaud’s famous demand that “we must be absolutely modern” in remarkable ways.

Adopting a mask or persona, an identity other than the author’s, is an old literary device, intensified for various reasons in the Twentieth Century. Replacing one’s given name with one’s initials became a bit of a fashion among anglophone poets, T. S. Eliot or more radically H.D. being perhaps the best known. Postwar or postmodern poetry probing the implications of the death of the author have worked to compose works wherein the language rather than the author might be said to be what speaks. Q, too, in a not dissimilar manner, adopts a persona, a move with rhetorical affect. This pseudonym, evoking both James Bond and real-world security-clearance designations, lends Q an air of credibility that tellingly draws on both fictional and factual connotations. Moreover, his revelations are made to appear all the more true as their being shared in even such a piecemeal, obscure manner is made to seem to endanger his life. In the conspirosphere it’s an old trick of putative insiders to lend their leaks gravity by their being secret, to whatever degree.

Aside from developing and coining the expression “the death of the author” French critic Roland Barthes also articulated an important distinction, that between “work” and “text”, most fully explored in S/Z. All too simply put, the classical work stands over against the reader as a seamless, polished, finished monumental aesthetic object achieved by the labour of the genius of the author; the text, on the other hand demands as much engagement and work from the reader to complete the aesthetic object. Barthes describes a text as “a galaxy of signifiers” that need be “constellated” by the reader. (Admittedly, the distinction goes back to the Jena Romantics and is roundly deconstructed by Barthes himself in S/Z; nevertheless, it remains valuable in discussing modes of avant garde writing). In this light, QAnon’s conspiracy theory is a text, at both the micro and macro levels.

The theory is articulated by a thread spun of “crumbs”, a series of short, telegraphic, sometimes encoded lines, that resemble, at least typographically, poems:

Some lines are complete sentences; others (e.g.,”Suicide watch” or “Bigger than people can imagine”) are more cryptic, demanding an active interpretation. Often, the reader is addressed in the imperative tense (“Ask yourself…”) or is posed questions (“Why is HRC in NZ?”) supposedly to push the reader in a particular, interpretive direction. The lines that make up each crumb are organized paratactically, demanding the reader supply the grammatical and logical connections that would lend them even a linguistic coherence. These demands on the reader’s engagement reach a limit in encoded crumbs.

Thus, at the lowest level of composition, the crumb and its components, the theory is very much a text, lent a significant amount of logic and significance by the reader.

At the next higher level of organization, that between crumbs, both consecutively and in general, the same demands are made. Just as each line of a crumb need be understood and each line connected with the other, the revelations of each crumb need be worked up into a coherent whole that is subject to subsequent modification by rereadings of already released crumbs and subject to revision with the release of each day’s new crumbs. The theory is thus in a state of constant flux, an instability exacerbated by the basic incoherence of the crumbs taken individually and as a totality, as well as the added complications added to the mix by contributions to the thread by its readers. The theory then is in a state of constant expansion and complication.

Another characteristic of avant garde art is its interest in exploring and exploiting the latest media technology makes available. In this light, QAnon is strikingly modern, availing itself of the possibilities of the digital medium: being digital, appearing where it does to address a particular audience, being open-ended both in its own on-going composition and in its readers’ participation. In a more profound way, though, the theory depends on another dimension of our modernity born with digital culture, that of the demand for “transparency” and its consequences. As theorist Stanley Fish eloquently observes, the demand for equal access to data, free of the editorial manipulations of elites or other gatekeepers, produces precisely an informational galaxy of signifiers that are then open to an absolutely “democratic” or anarchic constellation by those with access to it. QAnon’s unwinding story is premissed on precisely this situation, made up as it is of just those bits of data that the thread’s readers in turn organize into a more or less coherent if incomplete picture.

QAnon, then, is a remarkable example of absolutely contemporary ((post)”modern”) art, in its adoption of a pseudonymous persona for rhetorical affect, in its inventing a new genre of linguistic expression (the crumb) that puts to use poetic and rhetorical devices, in its overall organization reminiscent of avant garde literature, and in its very medium and exploitation of various aesthetic possibilities of that medium, all premissed and arising from the media if not epistemic conditions of the age, the ascendancy of data over news and the increasing anarchy of world views and political polarization this shift enables and gives rise to.